Messages - chadfx

+1 for bigben's approach (or do the same in Lightroom)...it's usually fairly quick work and most of the time is 'close enough'. I haven't found Photoscan to be particularly sensitive to minor variations anyway

If you really want to get fancy, you could put all of the images as a sequence into a compositing tool, like Nuke, sample/average the values and automatically apply the necessary corrections to the images...but it also might get thrown off if the subject matter in the images varies too greatly

I didn't see anything on the RAWTherapee web pages that would do any sort of automatic exposure balancing across a series of image.

That makes sense, thanks. I know that outside perspective correction is a usually a strict no-no for Photoscan. It sounds like it will figure it all out on its own either way (camera corrected JPGs or uncorrected RAWs). I certainly haven't had poor results from the RAWs, but it would be worth a comparison at some point I suppose (if only time were more plentiful...sigh)

Hi Borgy, I can't say exactly why you are seeing these differences in the PS computations. When I did my initial RAW vs JPG comparisons, it was only on individual photos and not through the entire PS pipeline. I haven't done much testing with this setup since them, sorry. I'm not if I ever really compared the results as you have here. It's certainly possible that the camera JPGs are a better fit for PS processing.

When you are converting your images from RAW, there are some additional adjustments might be helpful, such as noise reduction, which is likely happening in the camera's JPGs. I would probably suggest starting from a comparison of the photos themselves and verifying that a converted RAW image actually does look better than the camera's JPG. Hopefully that would improve your PS results. There are also a number of different RAW conversion tools, some better than others. I am usually doing this with Adobe's Camera Raw (or Lightroom)

Welcome to the wonderful world of extractions...if your foreground is a similar color as the background, you are almost always going to have a difficult time separating the two. You will likely need to hand trace (rotoscope) the edges that the software cannot detect. You can try using more sophisticated extraction tools/plugins in something like Nuke, After Effects or Photoshop...but similar colors will almost always be a challenge.

oh, right...the Canon's can do that as well. I think it depends on what sort of live view focusing option you choose. on the Canon's they call it Quick Focus I think, so it flips the mirror back down to focus via phase detection, then flips the mirror back up so you can use live view. although in this case I would highly recommend using manual focus, so I believe you shouldn't get any mirror slap. some live view modes have an extra 'quiet shutter' mode, which also might be useful

You can get by without a remote, just set the self timer to 2 secs...you can also use mirror lock up, which can help eliminate any other vibrations. although if you use live view, you don't need to worry about that aspect

iso800 is probably not going to help you, though...just use a good tripod, make sure everything is stable after you tweak focus and fire off the self timer.

Morgan, are you sure those two images match their captions? I would bet that the photo on the bottom is from the DSLR, as it has a shallower depth of field (focus is not sharp front to back) due to the much larger sensor of the camera as compared to the small point and shoot. Any part of the image that is out of focus or otherwise unsharp will cause problems for Photoscan to solve correctly. (no points to lock onto when it's all blurry)

Try using a smaller aperture (f16 or f22) and use a tripod (due to the resulting slow shutter speed). You hopefully should see better sharpness across your object in the resulting photos.

Agreed, it is great that Alexey and team are open to discussion on this and many other subjects in the forums. It is rare to see, and much appreciated.However, it is still a disappointment to be left with the same options.

I think what makes it difficult is the vast price differential between the two versions of software. I can completely understand not wanting to cannibalize sales of your premium level product by not having enough feature separation between the two versions. But I don't think I have ever seen a larger difference in prices between a 'basic' and 'premium' version of software. It is a nearly 2000% price increase.

The pro version has some fairly important features (as indicated in this thread) to people who are working to create digital assets (games, cultural heritage, etc). Yet the price is much higher than other prices of software that are normally in the asset building pipeline (Zbrush, Mudbox, 3DCoat, etc). I understand that I am sort of talking 'apples and oranges' here, and that in the area of digital acquisition (laser scanners, structured light scanners, etc) the pricing for tools in that pipeline run much higher (and even far beyond the PS pro price).

I guess for many of us, we are just hoping there is some solution that can help bridge the gap.